The New Yorker:

No one was in a celebratory mood when, on April 14th, the New York Philharmonic returned to indoor live performance for the first time in more than a year. Instead, the atmosphere was meditative, wistful, even mournful. This was fitting, given what the city, the country, and the world have endured since the pandemic began. Working musicians are reeling. Most American orchestral players have had to accept considerable pay cuts, and freelancers are in a desperate state, some of them being forced to give up on music entirely. The composer Nico Muhly spoke for many colleagues this past March when he told the Times, “I don’t think there is a return to normal in the performing arts, I’m sorry to say. We have to make a new normal, and build a lot of it from scratch. This period has shone light on an unbelievable amount of baked-in inequality and rotten practices rooted in the foundation of everything we do.”

The setting was strange. Twenty-three string players and one percussionist gathered at the Shed, the performance complex at Hudson Yards. An audience of a hundred and fifty people was distributed in distanced pods across the floor of the McCourt, the Shed’s cavernous central space. Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, was absent; on the podium was Esa-Pekka Salonen, the former leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the new director of the San Francisco Symphony. (Van Zweden had taped two audience-free concerts with the orchestra in March, and then returned to his home in the Netherlands.) Salonen, in remarks from the stage, spoke of how his program was marked by a “sense of longing, nostalgia, and loss.” But he also conveyed how much it meant for both him and the musicians to see their audience face to face.

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